Today we’re proud to announce an app we’ve built called EduBeacons. It allows Years 5 and 6 age students to view lesson plans from their iPads when in proximity to an iBeacon. We built EduBeacons in partnership with our new friend, Paul Hamilton of appsbypaulhamilton.com and Matthew Flinders Anglican College in Queensland, Australia. Paul is an author, speaker, Apple Distinguished Educator, and overall education technology pioneer.
For those of you who haven’t yet been introduced to iBeacons, they are small bluetooth devices that can talk with smartphones. When near an iBeacon, your phone can detect how far the iBeacon is away and perform a function like open a website or push a notification.
Students running EduBeacons on their iPads are sent a welcome message when they enter a classroom equipped with iBeacons. And when a student gets within a few feet of a an individual iBeacon, a lesson plan appears on their screen. For Paul’s classrooms, he uses a setup of three iBeacons and EduBeacons to lead students to three unique learning zones – Art, Technology and Library. You can’t find EduBeacons on the App Store just yet, because it’s being tested in Queensland area schools right now. In the meantime, check out this great video that Paul put together, demo-ing EduBeacons.
We’ve had an absolute blast building this app. If you’d like to learn more about EduBeacons or using iBeacons in the classroom, reach out and let’s chat!